[House Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 109-129]
ASSESSING U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND'S MISSIONS AND ROLES
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
JUNE 29, 2006
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TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey, Chairman
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri ADAM SMITH, Washington
JOE WILSON, South Carolina MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
JOHN KLINE, Minnesota ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey
GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado RICK LARSEN, Washington
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas JIM COOPER, Tennessee
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada JIM MARSHALL, Georgia
JEFF MILLER, Florida CYNTHIA McKINNEY, Georgia
FRANK A. LoBIONDO, New Jersey
Alex Kugajevsky, Professional Staff Member
Bill Natter, Professional Staff Member
Brian Anderson, Staff Assistant
C O N T E N T S
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CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2006
Page
Hearing:
Thursday, June 29, 2006, Assessing U.S. Special Operations
Command's Missions and Roles................................... 1
Appendix:
Thursday, June 29, 2006.......................................... 29
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THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006
ASSESSING U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND'S MISSIONS AND ROLES
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Meehan, Hon. Martin T., a Representative from Massachusetts,
Ranking Member, Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and
Capabilities Subcommittee...................................... 2
Saxton, Hon. Jim, a Representative from New Jersey, Chairman,
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee 1
WITNESSES
Boot, Max, Senior Fellow in National Security Studies, Council on
Foreign Relations.............................................. 8
Downing, Gen. Wayne A. (Ret.), Chairman, Combating Terrorism
Center, U.S. Military Academy at West Point.................... 2
Vickers, Michael G., Director of Strategic Studies, Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments............................ 6
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Boot, Max.................................................... 43
Saxton, Hon. Jim............................................. 33
Vickers, Michael G........................................... 38
Documents Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Questions and Answers Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Questions submitted.]
ASSESSING U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND'S MISSIONS AND ROLES
----------
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities
Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Thursday, June 29, 2006.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:31 a.m., in
room 2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. James Saxton
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JIM SAXTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW
JERSEY, CHAIRMAN, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND
CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Saxton. Good morning.
I have an opening statement that I am going to ask be put
in the record.
The purpose of today's hearing is to update ourselves on
the activities and capabilities of the Special Operations
Command.
As the threat changes, our capabilities have to change as
well. And one of the agile parts of our national security
system is Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and the agility
never ceases to amaze me and how we identify threats and change
our tactics and procedures to meet those threats. SOCOM has
been very good at that over the years.
So we thought we would get together this outside panel to
give us a current look at how SOCOM activities are perceived,
experts who are not necessarily still or have been part of
Special Operations Command.
With us today are General Wayne Downing, Chairman,
Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy at West
Point. I would especially like to thank General Downing for
being with us today as a former commander of SOCOM. I am sure
your testimony will be particularly enlightening.
And also, Michael Vickers, director of strategic studies,
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments; and Max Boot,
senior fellow of the National Security Studies Council on
Foreign Relations. We look forward to hearing from you.
But before we do that let me ask my friend and companion
here, Marty Meehan, for any comments he may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Saxton can be found in the
Appendix on page 33.]
STATEMENT OF HON. MARTIN T. MEEHAN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
MASSACHUSETTS, RANKING MEMBER, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL
THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Meehan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to join you in
welcoming the witnesses today and associate myself with the
chairman's remarks and provide a few of my own for emphasis.
Mr. Chairman, as you know, I am keenly interested in our
national security posture and philosophical approach to the
Global War on Terror. Much of our work since 9/11 has been
focused on the business of providing the best possible
resources available.
I would like to believe that this focus and the work of
this committee has contributed to SOCOM's current capability,
yet with the beginning of our 5th year in this struggle I have
grown increasingly pessimistic about our overall philosophy.
As the conflict continues to grow in duration, I am faced
with the prospect that we might not be applying military
resources in the most prudent and effective manner.
As a nation, are we overly focused on the area of our
operation in Iraq and Afghanistan? Do we overly favor the
option of direct action at the expense of unconventional
military techniques?
Have we failed to accurately interpret the nature of this
conflict? Does it call for a counterterrorism or
counterinsurgency strategy? In essence, are we properly
expanding the use of forces? These are just a few of the
questions that have been put before this committee that are of
concern.
General Downing, you find yourself in fine company today.
You are flanked by two of the great writers in the field of
military theory. Yet because of your own experiences, you are
obviously uniquely qualified to present testimony.
And I am impressed with your experience not only in uniform
but your experience since then on the staff of the National
Security Council (NSC) and as an independent critic of SOCOM
and Secretary Rumsfeld, and your present role, obviously, at
West Point.
So I hope the panelists can share their candid assessment
of this and help us help the department to improve. And you
know, I think this country deserves nothing less than that.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Saxton. Thank you very much.
General Downing, why don't you lead off and tell us what
you think?
STATEMENT OF GEN. WAYNE A. DOWNING (RET.), CHAIRMAN, COMBATING
TERRORISM CENTER, U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY AT WEST POINT
General Downing. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you and
members for allowing me to come back in here. I don't get to
come to these hearings very much anymore, and, unlike some
military guys, we were always treated very well up here. So my
experiences coming both here and to the other body were always
generally very positive experiences, because we were created,
as you know, by the Congress, and we were certainly well taken
care of here. I see that continuing.
I am reminded that I have been retired for 10 years, and
the capability of U.S. Special Operations Command, which I left
10 years ago, is exceedingly greater than it was in 1996. And
certainly, their performance in this struggle over the last
almost 5 years has really allowed them to develop and to hone
their skill.
I am also reminded that I left Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC) 15 years ago, and the JSOC capability is so far
beyond what we had when we went out into the desert during the
first Gulf War.
The performance of the units has been outstanding,
primarily focused in Afghanistan and Iraq. You are well aware
of this. I think one of the things that we have got to remember
is that this great performance has not come without cost to the
command. We have got cost in materiel, aircraft, vehicles,
weapons, radios.
I think we ought to also remember that over 1,000 special
operators have been killed or wounded since we started, a
percentage and a rate which far exceeds that of the
conventional forces. I think that is to be understood.
The number of killed in action, I really don't know what
that number is, except I certainly know it is north of 100 and
perhaps even closer to 200.
That is very troubling to me because it takes so long to
train these special operators to make them effective. It takes
about 18 months to get a special forces soldier through all of
his training, his language training, and get him out to the
field.
It takes about the same kind of thing for a combat
controller or for an Air Force para-rescue guy. Some of these
crew members, for the 160th and for AFSOC take over a year to
get them trained to go to the field.
When you go to the special mission units, both the Army and
the Navy special mission units, it takes 10 years to 15 years
to get the kind of experience that you need to replace those.
So we have a big gap that unfortunately--of money and
resources--cannot fill.
While we have done an outstanding job in our current
operations, we must prepare for the future fight. I think we
have got to possibly remind ourself that this is not a war that
we are involved with. It is more on the order of a global
counterinsurgency campaign.
The objective is to drain the swamp, not kill all the
alligators in the swamp. In some cases, we end up killing the
alligators and they are replaced almost as fast as we can kill
them or capture them.
And so what we have got to look at is we have got to look
at getting after causes of this insurgency. And this reminds us
all that this is not a military struggle. This is a political,
it is an economic, and it is a social struggle.
The military has a role to play, but it is just a role. I
would offer to you that the military cannot win this struggle,
but they could lose it.
And one of the things that I have seen over the last five
years is the great difficulty in bringing the power of the
United States government to bear on these problems. And this is
tied up in our interagency process. There is a lot of
competition. We have a lot of inability to bring this team
together. And I think we really have to get after that.
I think we have also got to remind ourself that this
struggle is more than global manhunting. It is more than the
direct action piece. It is more than combat, foreign internal
defense and unconventional warfare.
These are necessary activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, but
they are not enough. I think sometimes we get mesmerized
because of the skill and the daring of our special operators
that do these jobs, and I think sometimes people think that
that is all that is involved in the special operations forces'
contribution to the struggle. It is not.
We have got to get after the future base area. We have got
to get after developing friends and allies and proxies. Because
when you fight an insurgency, the best people to do this are
the host country. They are not American forces.
And that is one thing that special operations do, is they
are a tremendous force multiplier, where, you know, 10 special
forces soldiers can leverage 500 or maybe even 1,000 of the
other.
We are, I believe, expanding our Human Intelligence
(HUMINT) operations, and I think this is totally appropriate
because intelligence is so important in a counterinsurgency
operation.
I see great progress between the Pentagon and the
intelligence community on flexible detailing of special
operators into places like the CIA, where they can be used for
Title 50 authorities rather than Title 10; very effective to
get out and accomplish the job.
U.S. SOCOM has been given a very, very difficult task.
General Brown has been tasked with Unified Command Plan (UCP)
2004 with being the synchronizer and the coordinator of this
term Global War on Terror. And this is very, very difficult for
him, because what he has been asked to do is counterculture.
He has been asked to do things which, in the past, have
been the purview of the joint staff. There has certainly been
resentment in the geographical combatant commanders about his
new roles and his ability to get out and synchronize and
coordinate.
Tampa, Florida, is a long way from Washington, D.C. Believe
me, I remember that from my days here. And it is very, very
difficult to think that you are going to synchronize and
coordinate the Department of Defense's (DOD's) effort in this
struggle and do it from Tampa, Florida, because where things
get done and where things happen is in this town.
So General Brown has been given a very, very tough mission.
I think there is recognition of how tough it is in the
Pentagon. I think they are trying to help them, but I don't
think we should delude ourself that all these barriers that
inhibit him have gone away.
There is also a lot of overlap. Some overlap is always
good, but you have got to question yourself how much overlap
and how much duplication of effort is there going on between
things like the Center for Special Operations down in Tampa,
JSOC at Fort Bragg, the National Counter Terrorism Center
(NCTC) up here in Washington and the Joint Staff. There is a
lot of effort going on, and some rationalization probably ought
to be applied to that.
I think SOCOM needs a command element in D.C. If I could
change the world, I would move the whole command up here. But
that is very difficult, because real estate is at such a
premium.
But of course, this flies in the face of what is the role
of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the services.
And many of them see that as a threat to what they do if you
move SOCOM up here.
But yet for SOCOM to be given this mission of synchronize
and coordinate, they have to be up here. So we have a dilemma
here, and in my mind it is not solved.
I would like to see more special operations forces flag
officers in the global combatant commands and in the joint task
forces, because they have very unique capabilities.
I would also like to see more conventional units assigned
to the joint special operations task forces. We have always
been able to handle that. It is certainly a talent of our
commanders that they enable this to happen.
The fourth point I would like to make is on JSOC. One of
the recommendations that myself and Mike Vickers made along
with Bill Garrison in November when we did a quick look at this
subject for Secretary Rumsfeld was we recommended that he
enhance JSOC to a three-star command.
We also recommended he be given four deputy commanders--two
major generals and two brigadier generals--which would give
that command the ability to field five joint special operations
task forces.
Right now, there are just three of them, and all three of
those commanders have never been in the same room together
because of their operations tempo (optempo). At least one of
them has always been gone, and the only time they see each
other together is on video teleconferences.
I also recommended that JSOC report directly to the
secretary of defense. Now, that was rejected. I understand why.
But the thought was while SOCOM is going through this very,
very difficult transition period to these new missions that
they have been given, my feeling was that the JSOC could
operate much faster and much more efficiently if you took out a
command layer--in other words, let them go direct to the
SECDEF.
It would allow them to be very, very flexible, because one
of the things that we found is that the staff processes in the
Joint Chief of Staff (JCS), in Office of the Secretary of
Defense (OSD) and in the interagency impede operations. The
national command authority wants fast, responsive, flexible and
innovative solutions to their problems in this Global War on
Terror, but their staff system produces exactly the opposite.
Things that should take days take weeks. Things that should
take weeks take months. And some of the decisions that have to
be made have to be made in hours, absolutely in hours.
The other thing that I think command should look at, and
that is lowering this wall between black and white SOF. That
has always been a problem between the special mission units and
the rest of special operations. I would judge that since the
war those walls are higher than they were in 2001.
There is some reasons for it, but one of the reasons that
we proposed the five joint special operations task forces is
that we would like to see the black and the white operate
together under one commander. You can still have walls for
security, but I just think we could get a better application of
resources if we did that.
The last point I would like to make is that there has been
some great practices that have come out of Operation Iraqi
Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), and we need
to benchmark those practices not only for the rest of special
operations but for the entire military. These are the joint
interagency task forces.
I think General McCrystal's work in this area has just been
exemplary, how he has brought all of these different elements
of the United States government together, and they brought them
together and they work very, very effectively together.
This operation against Zarqawi is the epitome of it. That
goes on not only in Iraq but it also goes on in Afghanistan.
They have done that very, very well.
Counternetwork operations task force--been developed. They
work well. Transient screening facilities have worked well, and
also joint reconnaissance task force have worked very well.
Some very, very good things going on.
Gentlemen, I obviously don't have the answer to a lot of
the detailed questions. Members of the command can give you
that. Certainly, General Brown can.
I am very proud of these soldiers, sailors, airmen and now
these Marines, and I think you should be too. They are doing a
hell of a job.
Thank you.
Mr. Saxton. Thank you very much, General Downing.
We are going to hear from Mike Vickers next, and then we
will go over to Mr. Boot, and then we will have some questions.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL G. VICKERS, DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC STUDIES,
CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS
Mr. Vickers. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, members of the
committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you
today to share my views with you on the missions and roles of
the United States Special Operations Command.
The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review produced a number of
important decisions with respect to Special Operations Forces
operational capabilities, capacity and posture, a number of
which were recommended by General Downing, Bill Garrison and
myself in the report that General Downing mentioned.
These capability and capacity expansions are absolutely
essential. About 80 percent of our current force is tied up in
Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, and the basic
intent over the longer term is not only to redeploy these
forces but to have a more intense city-state effort for the
Global War on Terror (GWOT) until this necessitated the SOF
expansion.
SOF will really be the main DOD instrument, not necessarily
the main U.S. Government instrument in all cases, but main DOD
instrument in the longer term Global War on Terror.
A number of special operations units were increased by one-
third. Special forces battalions, ranger companies, classified
special mission unit squadrons, psychological operations
(PSYOPs) and civil affairs both in the active duty and Reserve
component.
A Marine Special Operations Command was stood up that will
contribute to the foreign internal defense area as well as the
direct action and special reconnaissance area. And investments
were made in new capabilities in tagging, tracking, locating
terrorists, in covered air mobility and in persistent air
surveillance with the UAV squadron for Air Force Special
Operations Command.
These are all very, very good initiatives. I want to
highlight, however, that while SOCOM is doing a very good job
in facilitating this expansion with its new 18X program to
attract additional special forces talent directly from civilian
life, and increasing the institutional base, increasing the
throughput of the special forces school, which has essentially
doubled in the past couple of years.
Retention is really critical, and incentives to retain the
force that we have will be vital to its expansion as well as
its continued quality.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the planning
capacity of the Department of Defense for the Global War on
Terror has been significantly bolstered. As General Downing
mentioned, SOCOM has stood up the Center for Special
Operations.
The Theater Special Operations Command has been
significantly augmented to make them far more capable of 24/7
long duration operations. And the command and staff elements of
JSOC have likewise been strengthened for long duration
operation.
SOCOM has produced GWOT-related concept plans and
operations plans, the 7,500 series, which were first rate. The
Defense Department is currently in the process of identifying
the resources needed to implement these plans.
Mr. Saxton. Let me just interrupt just for a minute, just
so everybody--here is the game plan. We have got a 15-minute
vote, a 2-minute vote, and another 15-minute vote, so we can be
here for another 10 minutes before we have to leave, and then
we will be gone for about 20 minutes.
Mr. Vickers. Okay.
As General Downing noted, SOCOM has experienced some
difficulty in fulfilling its role as the lead combatant command
in two areas, in top-level integration and interagency planning
process and in control of global SOF forces or other forces
that may be placed under their command.
As General Downing noted, the GWOT is an intelligence and
special-operations-intensive war. SOCOM has made great strides
in the intelligence arena since 9/11. Two advanced special
operations training level three courses have been stood up, and
they are producing a couple hundred graduates a year, which
significantly expand our HUMINT capability.
Making full use of authorities in the GWOT both in
intelligence and operations, as General Downing noted, is
critical, particularly the flexible detailing and exploitation
of the CIA's Title 50 authority.
Further, integrating our partners since this indirect
approach and leveraging proxies and surrogates will be central
to our operation through a global counterterrorism network and
with appropriate communications is also vital.
On the legislative side, given the importance of seasoned
operators--and one of the things of the GWOT is it is very kind
to 40-year-olds where some of the direct action missions
weren't. It has placed a premium on the intelligence side.
One of the things we might look at is providing SOF
additional relief from the provisions of section 517 of Title
10 of the U.S. Code which limits the number of E8 and E9
soldiers in the force.
The special mission units have received waivers in this
area, but it is time to look at expanding this to white SOF as
well, given the increasing role those senior soldiers are
playing.
Unconventional warfare is a vital GWOT instrument against
both state and non-state actors, and SOCOM has made very good
strides of late in this area to develop a global unconventional
warfare plan. It needs to be properly resourced, however.
The section 1208 authority which grants SOF the authority
to conduct paramilitary operations or fund irregular forces
needs to be expanded several fold over the program years to
several hundred million dollars a year, up from its current
level of $25 million or so.
I fully concur with what General Downing said about black
and white integration of SOF in the field under a single
commander. It does seem like, in some cases, we are doing
better in the field, but the general direction is not good.
With that, I will conclude my statement.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Vickers can be found in the
Appendix on page 38.]
Mr. Saxton. Thank you very much.
Mr. Boot.
STATEMENT OF MAX BOOT, SENIOR FELLOW FOR NATIONAL SECURITY
STUDIES, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
Mr. Boot. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to
the members of the subcommittee for inviting me to testify
along with two men I hold in such high regard as Wayne Downing
and Mike Vickers.
I would like to begin by noting, as have my fellow
analysts, that SOCOM is, in many ways, a very impressive
organization. But I think it is also a very limited
organization, and certainly not the organization that is going
to win the Global War on Terror for us.
In fact, SOCOM, I would suggest, as Congressman Meehan
suggested in his opening statement, has become very focused on
direct action, on rappelling out of helicopters, kicking down
doors, taking out bad guys.
Now, we need to do that, and that strategy can obviously
pay off with some major dividends, as when we capture Saddam
Hussein or kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But I think we have seen in the aftermath of those major
operations the limitations of that manhunter model of
counterterrorism or counterinsurgency, because what we are
still stuck with in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere are very
large, very decentralized insurgencies which are not going
anywhere even if you take out a handful of the top leaders.
Making real progress against Islamist terrorism is going to
require accomplishing much more difficult and much less
glamorous tasks such as establishing security, furthering
economic and political development, and spreading the right
information to win hears and minds among the uncommitted Muslim
masses.
Above all, it will require working with indigenous allies
who must carry the bulk of the burden in this type of conflict.
In other words, it will require more emphasis not on direct
action but on unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense,
PSYOPS, civil affairs, all of those other specialties which
have been getting shortchanged by SOCOM.
There is certainly a sense among the Army special forces
community, among the Green Berets, that what they do is less
appreciated and less valued, and less emphasis is put on it
than it should be, in favor of these sexier Special Weapons and
Tactics (SWAT)-style raids in which SOCOM has become so
proficient.
I got an e-mail a few weeks ago from one recently retired
special forces colonel who wrote to me the current problem of
SOCOM is that it is unbalanced. Most of the leadership and
planning staff have come from the direct action (D.A.) side.
They have no understanding of unconventional warfare (U.W.)
Another more senior retired special forces officer e-mailed
to me to complain of the total USSOCOM preoccupation with
rating SOF orientation on special operations and absolutely
none on low-intensity conflict.
And similar concerns have shown up in print, for example,
in Sean Naylor's article in Armed Forces Journal, ``More Than
Door-Kickers,'' which quoted yet another retired special forces
officer who warned that if we spend the rest of our lives
capturing and killing terrorists at the expense of those
special forces missions that are more important, gaining access
to the local population, training indigenous forces, providing
expertise and expanding capacity, then we are doomed to
failure.
When I hear such complaints coming from so many special
forces veterans for whom I have such high respect, I take them
very seriously. And obviously, the committee does as well, and
I am glad to hear that.
The question, of course, you are confronted with is well,
what do you do about this. Is it possible to change SOCOM's
orientation? I think given the way it is currently constituted,
given its emphasis on kicking down doors, given where the bulk
of its leadership has come from, I think it is very hard to
have major changes within the current structure of SOCOM.
For this reason, there is growing interest within U.S. Army
special forces circles about creating a new joint
unconventional warfare command within SOCOM which would
basically be a U.W. equivalent to the Joint Special Operations
Command which encompasses units like Delta Force and Seal Team
6, and focuses on direct action missions.
An unconventional warfare command could bring together Army
special forces, civil affairs and PSYOPs by essentially
expanding the role of the Army Special Operations Command at
Fort Bragg. That strikes me as a pretty good idea.
But I would also urge the committee to think outside of the
current bureaucratic boundaries and think about possibly
removing the unconventional warfare mission from SOCOM
altogether.
I would like to conclude my testimony with a very brief
synopsis of an old idea for how this could be accomplished, by
essentially resurrecting the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), which was created in 1942 to gather intelligence as well
as to conduct low-intensity warfare behind enemy lines in
occupied Europe and Asia.
OSS was disbanded after World War II and, as you know, both
the Green Berets and the CIA trace their lineage to this august
ancestor. My proposal was to recreate OSS by bringing together
under one roof not only Army special forces, civil affairs and
PSYOPs, but also the CIA's paramilitary special activities
division.
This could be a joint civil military agency under the
combined oversight of the secretary of defense and the director
of national intelligence, like the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA) or National Security Agency (NSA). It could bring
together in one place all of the key skill sets needed to wage
the softer side of the war on terrorism.
Like SOCOM, it would have access to military personnel and
assets, but like the CIA special activities division, its
operations would contain a higher degree of covertness,
flexibility and deniability than those carried out by the
uniform military.
One of the key advantages of an OSS redux is that it might
be able to enhance our understanding of the societies in which
terrorists operate. Such knowledge can be acquired in one of
two ways, either by long-term immersion in foreign societies or
by simply recruiting from the societies in which we fight.
OSS II could facilitate both approaches in the first place
by modifying the military's frenetic personnel rotation
policies which make it almost impossible to acquire true area
expertise, and in the second place by modifying our overly
restrictive citizenship requirements, which currently limit
military service to citizens or green card holders.
The Green Berets recruited non-citizens in the 1950's when
the Lodge Act allowed the enlistment of Eastern Europeans.
Something similar should be tried today to recruit from Muslim
societies around the world, starting with Muslim immigrant
populations within the United States.
I bet there would be plenty of high-quality recruits who
would be willing to serve in return for one of the world's most
precious commodities, U.S. citizenship. It might even make
sense to stand up an entire brigade or even a division of
foreign fighters led by American officers and Noncommissioned
Officers (NCOs). Call it the Freedom Legion.
OSS II would be a natural repository for such an outfit,
considering the success the original OSS had in running
indigenous forces such as the Burmese tribesmen who battled the
Japanese in World War II.
It is also possible that OSS could be a prime repository of
nation-building expertise within the U.S. Government, which is
a capacity that we desperately need to develop and for which we
have paid a high price in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Nation-building is an important part of counterinsurgency,
because you have to provide a viable government to compete with
the guerilla shadow government. This is not something we have
done a very good job of doing. And again, this OSS-type agency
could be tasked with developing a core of personnel who are
skilled in those areas.
Now, I realize the creation of a new OSS is a radical
notion and it needs a good deal more study and discussion and
debate. But if we are to be successful in the long war, we need
to think outside of the traditional bureaucratic boxes, because
the U.S. Government, as currently set up, and that includes
SOCOM, simply is not adequately configured for the tasks ahead.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Boot can be found in the
Appendix on page 43.]
Mr. Saxton. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Boot. That
was a very stimulating and enlightening set of thoughts.
We are going to go ahead and vote, and we have probably got
about 5 minutes left in this vote, and that will give us time
to get there, and we will be back in about 20 minutes.
[Recess.]
Mr. Saxton. General Downing, while I was gone, I thought
about talking with Bill Young about moving SOCOM headquarters
to Washington. I decided otherwise. [Laughter.]
I had a few minutes to think about the testimony that we
heard, and it is very encouraging testimony in this respect.
Military and political leaders have always known that the
threat constantly changes, and therefore our capabilities to
meet the threat have to constantly change as well. It goes
without saying. It is a very basic principle.
And in the case of the Global War on Terror, that is as
true today as it has ever been. And we found out that we had
some weaknesses in the 1980's, and in 1987 we took some steps
to try to change to face that threat.
We found out the threat changed again in the--maybe it
didn't change again, but it manifested itself in the early
1990's, and we recognized that the conventional force was less
capable of dealing with it and the Special Operations Command
was more capable of dealing with it.
And recently, as I flew from Balad to Baghdad, after
hearing briefings about the oil flow, the electricity, and on
that helicopter flight, I looked down at Iraqis with hoes and
rakes and picks, and no tractors, I recognized that there was
not only work to be done in the oil sector and in the
electrical sector, utility sector, but in the agricultural
sector as well.
And when we got back to Baghdad and had a chance to talk
with the U.S. ambassador, I realized as I sat in, I don't know,
over 100 degrees of heat and watched them elect their first
speaker, and was introduced to some number of their
parliamentarians, I recognized that the State Department had a
lot of work to do.
And I came back to this country and talked to General
Vines, who had just come back, and I said how are we doing. He
said, well, the military was doing okay. But he said in the
other sectors, we are not doing as well--not doing very well,
maybe he said.
Actually, he was more graphic than that. He said some
things, though, that led me to believe that the way that we are
meeting the threat today in Iraq, even though we have tried to
change to meet it better, is not very good.
One of the changes that we recognized is that people who
were there on the ground before me, before I was, before I had
these thoughts that I just expressed to you, we recognized that
there was a need for better coordination among agencies and
gave General Brown the job of synchronizing the activities
involved in the Global War on Terror.
So we are trying to make the changes that are necessary to
better enable us to meet the threat and solve the problems of
the Global War on Terror. And so within that context, all of
your testimony is very welcome, and your ideas are very, very
welcome.
And we want to help make that happen, of course, in
conjunction with the people who are currently in SOCOM, and the
military leadership at the Pentagon as well.
Let me just ask this. If you had a blank sheet of paper--
no, let's start where we are now. If you had your wish list,
what are the three or four things in order to meet this threat
that you would do differently?
Mr. Boot, you testified last. Why don't you take a stab at
that first?
Mr. Boot. Well, I think the big thing upon which there is
wide agreement is the need to have better human intelligence,
better knowledge of foreign cultures and languages and
societies. The question upon which it is very difficult to find
an answer is how do you achieve that.
I mean, we all talk about let's do more language training,
let's do more of this and that, but is that really going to
achieve the goals that we need to achieve?
And I think the problem is that given the current
bureaucratic structures it is very, very hard to do that.
Structures such as the personnel rotation policies, where even
in specialized units like the Army Special Forces, you have
officers who have to rotate in and out for various career
development reasons, where they have to spend a little time in
the field, a little time in staff jobs, schools, et cetera, et
cetera.
And it makes it very hard to maintain that kind of very
deep knowledge of one specific area where you might wind up
operating, and the same problem exists in the State Department,
in the CIA and elsewhere in the government, because all of our
personnel policies, which I think are really in some ways at
the root of the problem here, are designed for rotation and to
create well-rounded individuals, essentially, well-rounded
officers, well-rounded State Department officers, well-rounded
CIA officers.
And that is a commendable goal, and we need those well-
rounded people, but what it means it that we don't really have
the people who are the world's living top experts on places
like Waziristan or Anbar Province or wherever our forces may be
operating.
And I think what we need to do is basically create
exceptions within our current system. We need to carve out some
people who are not going to be generalists, some people who are
not going to be rotating, some people who are not going to be
on the fast track to the top, but who can stay in one place or
one area for decades at a time and gain the kind of knowledge
that the Brits--and the Brits did this so well in the 19th
century, when they had people like T.E. Lawrence and Richard
Francis Burton, and Gertrude Bell and others who were these
kind of eccentric characters but who were incredible
repositories of information on the very areas of the world
where the British Empire was operating.
And we need those same kind of people, too. They exist, and
there are Americans who fit these categories, and I meet them
whenever I go around the world.
No matter how terrible the place, you always find American
expats who are living there, except they are usually working as
aid workers, or journalists or some other capacity in the
private sector. They are not working for the U.S. Government.
And we need to harness those kinds of people for the U.S.
Government.
And so my idea for creating an OSS is just one thought I
threw out there, and perhaps a clumsy one, for how do you kind
of create this carve-out, this set-aside, from the cookie-
cutter personnel policies that govern most of the military and
most of the other government agencies, so you can create this
kind of true expertise that we can draw upon and build the kind
of personal relationships we really need in order to pacify
some of these troubled areas that give rise to terrorism.
Mr. Saxton. General Downing.
General Downing. I would say, and it re-emphasizes
something I said in my opening remarks, we need an interagency
process that works. I don't know, Mr. Chairman, if you can
legislate something like that. But certainly, the executive
branch has to come up with it. It doesn't work here.
It works better in the field, but it always does, because
when you get out in the field you have people trying to solve
their own problems and realizing they have to work together.
One of the things that is just killing us, beyond the
Washington problem, is when you get to the field the other
parts of the United States government are not there. In other
words, you don't have the kind of expertise from the State
Department that you need throughout the area.
I was in Al Anbar Province, I guess, five times in the last
couple of years, and they had a Political Advisor (POLAD) out
there, a foreign service officer, that had been out there
almost two years. I think he was on his third or fourth Marine
commander.
And this guy knew that province inside and out. I mean, he
knew every tribe. He knew the leaders. He knew how things fit
together. But you know, he is kind of a one man. Where are the
rest of the 18 provinces? You know, how are they covered? There
is a few of those.
You see the same thing out in Afghanistan. I was in Oruzgan
Province in February, talked to the province reconstruction
team, asked them--you know, they have had some FBI people. They
were doing well. Asked them what they needed, and the head of
the province reconstruction team, female Military Police (M.P.)
officer who was a Russian foreign area officer specialist, very
impressive woman, said the thing they really needed were their
two Department of Agriculture people who left last summer.
And I said, why? They said because they really added value
to what they were trying to do, and the Afghans trusted them,
and they were really making some headway. I said, well, why did
they leave? They left because the Department of Agriculture
didn't have enough money to go ahead and extend their
contracts.
So we have got to bring the interagency into the fight. I
think there is a lot of duplication of effort between the
Center for Special Operations (CSO), the National Counter-
Proliferation Center (NCPC) and JSOC. I really think that we
probably need to either move the CSO to JSOC or move it to the
CTC. I think we would get more out of it.
My JSOC comment about the SECDEF, I think that would do it.
And then these five JSODAs that bring black and white together
is the way I would go. During your vote, two of us talked. We
talked with some subject matter experts here in the room.
There is also another good case to do OSS II, as Max
presents, or as Mike and I have talked about some kind of a
JTF, but something that brings this together, that gets this
direct action world and this UW/FID world and all the HUMINT
operations tied together so they support each other.
A lot of distrust there, and we are not getting optimal
results.
Mr. Saxton. Mr. Vickers.
Mr. Vickers. I think we are on a pretty good path right now
for this long war. I think there are a couple shortfalls that
if I could be king for a day I would work on resolving. The big
one is really how the U.S. Government implements GWOT strategy
and integrates elements of national power.
The NCTC is really more of a roles assigner and monitoring
organization, to create integrated effects between agency,
military, war of ideas, financial interdiction.
We really don't have that kind of thing either globally in
Washington. And as General Downing said, there is a lot of
duplication, but we really don't have the national level, other
than setting broad strategic policy, that is actually
monitoring global operations and integrating them.
So I think we have a ways to go on U.S. Government
organization, interagency organization. I would underscore
several of the things General Downing said in that area.
Related to that is still some work in organizational
capabilities. I think DOD is well on its way. They need to do a
better job in languages and a few things, but made big strides
in the past few years.
And if we continue on this path and resource it--and SOCOM
will require significantly more resources to implement this
plan. It will probably require another 50 percent increase in
their budget or so over the program period. But they are well
on their way.
I think the CIA is well on its way toward transforming from
a Cold War force to a GWOT force. Now, they have got a very
young workforce right now, and that is a problem, because you
have to season these folks.
I think that is less true in the other areas of the
government in terms of war of ideas or in terms of an
expeditionary foreign service. We have a ways to go in that
area and creating the capabilities that we will need to do the
fight.
Mr. Saxton. Thank you.
Mr. Larsen, feel free to jump in here at any time. But I
just want to advance one set of ideas based on something that
happened very recently.
Yesterday, General Eikenberry was here, and in his
testimony he talked about the reorganization or re-emergence of
the Taliban. So there continue to be security issues, and our
Operational Detachment Alpha (ODAs) seem to be doing a pretty
good job leveraging indigenous forces against the Taliban. So
we are working that angle.
When he was asked what is your biggest need in Afghanistan,
he said $50 million for roads. And so we pursued that, and it
once again emphasized to me the need for interagency
cooperation and international cooperation.
So General Eikenberry turned to the State Department
representative who was there and said tell the congressman how
we are doing with the international effort. So the U.S. agency
called the State Department is now working an international set
of issues trying to get together $50 million to build that big
loop that we need and other things.
And then we got to talking about what else do you need. He
said well, we need more activities about people who can make it
profitable for Afghans to grow something besides poppies. And
so there is a need for that kind of expertise as well.
And of course, to know more about all of that and the
indigenous problems, we need intel. And so both in Iraq and
Afghanistan we see that our military guys are there doing what
they are trained to do, doing a good job, and have identified
different sets of needs in the two countries, but a variety of
different kinds of needs that we are not geared to meet,
effectively, at least.
So with that, let me just go to Mr. Larsen.
Mr. Larsen. Sure, and really bouncing off of that
statement, I think a very general assessment--and obviously we
can get into details--a general assessment is the PRTs tend to
be working better in Afghanistan, generally, than they are in
Iraq. And this is a fundamental critique that General McCaffrey
brought back from his recent trips to both countries as well.
And I was wondering if, maybe starting with you, General
Downing, you can help us, perhaps with focus a little bit on
our subject matter today, but can you help us understand why
there is a general difference between, again, the relative
success of the PRTs in Afghanistan and Iraq?
General Downing. Sir, I would say it is directly related to
the security situation. I think in Afghanistan we are able to
put them out. They are able to, you know, depending upon local
conditions, travel. But I think generally in Afghanistan the
security situation is better.
Some of the places in Iraq are just too dangerous to put
them out. And of course, we made a decision to live out of
bases, which means we get concentrated, and we are also, when
we are in those bases, completely cut off from contact with the
Iraqi people.
That, added to our sunglasses, our body armor and our
helmets, kind of create, you know, a formidable presence that
oftentimes isn't conducive to getting the people-to-people kind
of relationships. I think it is directly related to security.
Mr. Larsen. Yes.
Mr. Vickers, Mr. Boot, anything to add?
Mr. Vickers. I would agree totally. And the security
situation is a function of the unsettled politics. The Afghan
people were weary of 25 years of war. The political process
worked really well after Kabul fell and installing a government
right away, and so you had better initial conditions.
Now, there have been, you know, some resurgence of the
Taliban, but it is still a very, very different situation than
Iraq, where lots of things are still unsettled. And so
expecting, you know, sort of the PRTs to be the savior, you
know, it is going to take time for that to work.
The Iraqis are going to have to establish some measure of
security, and then we will be able to work on the development
side.
Mr. Boot. I will just pick up on the points that were just
made. I think absolutely we need more security right now in
Iraq, before you can have more development, and I think more
security will probably require more troops, at least in a place
like Baghdad where I think there is a real security crisis
going on right now.
But to pick up on a point that General Downing made, which
I completely agree, because I was struck by this as I traveled
around Afghanistan and Iraq in the last few months, is the
extent to which we are walling ourselves off from the
indigenous population on these giant bases, where you go to
places like our logistics support area, Anaconda, up near
Balad, or Camp Victory at Baghdad. I am sure you have all been
to these places. They are gigantic, tens of thousands of
people, and you could just as easily be at Fort Hood, Texas.
There is almost no way of knowing that you are actually in a
foreign country.
And most of the personnel we have in those countries spend
most of their time on those bases where I think anybody like
Mike Vickers or General Downing who has been engaged out in the
field will tell you you have got to be out in the field.
You have got to be interacting with the civilian population
in order to have success in a counterinsurgency. And very few
of our forces do that, for a variety of logistical and force
protection reasons.
So much of our effort basically is going to sustain these
giant bases, not necessarily to actually fight and win the
counterinsurgency, which is the reason why those bases are
there in the first place.
And I think, just to pick up on another point that was
briefly mentioned in terms of the interagency process, I think
one of the real gaps that we are missing is an agency that
specifically focuses on nation-building. because you see what
we had to do in the case of Iraq.
And a lot of the reason why we have the current problems in
Iraq is we didn't have an institution that would come in and
run a place like Iraq. The Administration created the ORHA from
scratch two months before the invasion in 2003 and then created
CPA from scratch in the middle of the war.
And neither of those organizations functioned very well,
and we don't have this natural repository within the government
of skill in nation-building.
A lot of it falls to the military because they are the guys
on the spot, but they are not trained in it, and they often
don't want to do it. They have to do it, but they wish there
would be somebody who could come in with the skill set to do
that.
And the skills do exist in places like the Department of
Agriculture and State and Treasury, and in the civilian sector
and various other places. But there is no organization that
knits those skills together so that in peace time, so we are
ready when a war breaks out or when a country disintegrates to
come in and run these things.
And I think that is one of the big organizational gaps that
we have to fill.
Mr. Larsen. So working backwards from that, or maybe
getting more particulars, especially with the subject of this
particular hearing, in Iraq what role does SOF play, say, in
Iraq to get us to that point where there can be something more
like an Afghanistan PRT team on the ground as opposed to what
we are doing right now?
General Downing. Well, of course, you have got the one
special operations force which is doing the manhunt, direct
action stuff. We all know about them, and they get, you know,
the majority of the press and the publicity.
The other part of special operations, though, are actually
working and training with the indigenous battalions, generally
the special battalions, special police commandos, Iraqi special
forces.
And then there is a significant endeavor with our regular
special operations forces on human intelligence operations,
which have been quite successful, which have benefitted not
only the U.S. forces but have also benefitted the Iraqi forces.
In my judgment, those are exactly the kind of activities
that we want them to do. In other words, we want to get more
into the unconventional warfare and more into the foreign
internal defense missions, and I think they are doing that.
While I don't have the details of this, I understand that
there are frictions on the ground between the special
operations forces and the conventional units, the conventional
units wanting the special operations guys to live and act and
behave more like they do.
And that has always been a problem. We used to have a
problem in Vietnam with that, although we keep the special
forces teams very separate. A lot of conventional commanders
didn't like their lack of haircuts or, you know, maybe the way
they wore their knives and their weapons. These are small
things.
We had this problem in Haiti when we went down there in
1994, but these little irritants sometimes impede operations. I
can remember in Afghanistan--and we have got several
Afghanistan veterans here; special forces tell these stories
better than I can--that, you know, they pretty much went
indigenous, grew their hair and their beards and everything.
You know, after a few months some of these guys with their
hair growth looked like hajis. I mean, you couldn't tell them
from another haji. But they showed up back at an American base
camp, and the first thing a conventional commander told them
was to get cleaned up.
Well, they weren't doing that just because they wanted to
look different. They were doing that because it fit in with the
people that they were working with, and you don't want to stand
out. And so they were doing the kind of things that you do in
an unconventional warfare mission. These are the kind of things
that really bite us.
But I think they are doing what we want them to do in Iraq.
The problem is that there is not enough of them. And you know,
that is probably the only U.S. troops I would like to see more
of.
I don't know what Max meant about more troops for security.
I don't want to see another American soldier go to Iraq, not
that I am worried about casualties and these kind of things--of
course, I am. I think the key to Iraq, and the key to every
country that we are involved in this struggle with, is the host
country.
And I think what we have got to do, and what we have done
very successfully, is build the host country forces. Now, in
Iraq, of course, we have got to build a civilian ministry that
is going to run those.
That is where the effort--I don't want to see any more U.S.
forces go in there, because I think the U.S. forces are
marginally effective. I mean, they are great. They are doing
great things. But their presence inflames the Iraqis. There is
just no other way to say it. You know?
In general, a U.S. patrol going through a street angers
them, and I think we need to get more Iraqis on the street.
Mr. Larsen. You know, we may have an opportunity to talk to
special operations folks and chat with them about their
experience in some of these conflicts.
Mr. Vickers.
Mr. Vickers. Well, I would strongly add my concurrence to
that last point about Iraq strategy going forward. And we have
shared this testimony with some high-level consumers recently.
On special forces, I agree with everything General Downing
said. The one piece that we might add: The biggest bang for the
buck we are getting with SOF in Iraq right now is with the
direct action forces, the manhunting and JSOC, with the special
forces working with the special units, the Iraqi special
operations brigade and the special police counterpart, and then
the intelligence stuff that General Downing mentioned.
And it is hard to do better than we are doing that stuff
right now. There is probably 4.5 special forces companies
there, or a little more than--about two-thirds of our effort,
that there is this friction with the conventional forces.
They are probably not being as optimally utilized in some
of these badland areas where they might work with the Iraqis to
bring some security where development could go.
One way to resolve that potentially is to give them an area
of operation, give them an area in Iraq and say you know,
senior SOF commander, this is your area, and as General Downing
suggested, you may have some conventional forces in support of
you, but give them a little more freedom of action.
And again, that is just a thought. You know, I don't want
to tell commanders over there how to do their business. And so
it is one way, you know, potentially, we might get a little
mileage out of a portion of the force.
But Iraq is going to be a protracted conflict, and it is
going to be won by the locals, as General Downing said.
Mr. Larsen. Can I just continue?
And just to clarify, Mr. Vickers, that is your personal
assessment on that.
Mr. Vickers. Yes, that is my personal assessment.
Mr. Larsen. Okay.
The next question I have sort of gets beyond Iraq and
Afghanistan and has to get us thinking about other places. Of
course, a lot of our attention is focused on Iraq and
Afghanistan, and certainly that is what we read about. But
there are other places: Djibouti, Horn of Africa, the Sahel,
Philippines.
Two things: What are your personal assessments about how
special forces are doing there in the tasks that we have asked
them to do?
And second, that begs the question, where are we going to
engage down the road? I will just ask it generally and----
General Downing. Well, you hit the areas. And, Mr.
Congressman, you are obviously very well informed on that. And
we are seeing right now what is happening in Somalia, because,
you know, that kind of answers part of your question. There is
stuff that is going on now that we have tried to mount
operations against and we have not.
It is not the military's particular job. It is another
government agency that has to. But of course, the military has
to perform that. In my opening comments, I said we need to get
ready for the future war, and that is exactly what I was
talking about.
There are just very few precious assets left to go around
the rest of the world, but yet this is where the new fight is,
and this is where we have got to go to develop these proxies,
these partners.
But once again, this is going to have to be done under a
broader umbrella than the military, and you are really talking
about, in these countries, the country teams, headed by the
country teams under which those military elements will be
working.
And so they have got to have a comprehensive political,
social, economic program that is going to fight these
insurgencies. One of the things that is very troubling is in
many of these countries they are going to have to undergo
profound political change within those countries if we are to
dry up the causes that people are joining this insurgency.
I mean, you know, you can just look at where these people
are coming from, and when you interrogate these people, these
are not poor, ignorant peasants. These, in many cases, are
well-educated, middle-class, wealthy and psychologically
stable. These are not psychopaths.
They are electing to join this movement because they are
disenfranchised citizens of whatever states they come from. And
so this has to be addressed if we are going to make progress.
And of course, that is like watching paint dry. It is going to
take a long time.
But that is what we have got to get ginned up for if we are
going to be successful.
Mr. Boot. If I could just--I think there is a big
distinction between the kind of conflicts you mentioned in your
second question and what you were talking about in the first
one, which was really Iraq and Afghanistan, because I think
when you look at places like the Horn of Africa or Northern
Africa or the Pankisi Gorge, or the Philippines, or all these
other places, those, to my mind, those are really SOF wars.
Those are the places where you are going to have special
forces on the front lines. And I think they are doing a
tremendous job of these kinds of foreign internal defense and
unconventional warfare missions, very small units operating
very low profile, and basically trying to manage these
situations, so we don't wind up in a situation like Iraq, where
you have 130,000 troops occupying the country.
Your ideal of counterinsurgency is the opposite. In fact,
what we did in El Salvador in the 1980's, when you had 55
special forces advisers, and you can argue that they achieved
more than 500,000 troops did in Vietnam. I mean, in some ways,
that is the ideal if you can achieve it.
But Afghanistan and especially Iraq are in a somewhat
different category, because we didn't pursue the kind of low-
intensity strategy, and probably for good reasons. I am not
sure the low-intensity strategy would have necessarily worked
in Iraq.
But so we go in there, we destroy their existing
government, we disband their existing army and security
structure, and then you can't say okay, then we are going to
send 55 special forces trainers to recreate the army and the
police forces in Iraq and restore order. That is not going to
work.
You need a bigger presence. And in general, I am very much
in sympathy with the outlook of General Downing and Mike
Vickers, as I understand it, basically, which is more is less,
and concentrate on the special forces, don't have a big
conventional footprint.
I think a lot of what we do with the conventional footprint
is counterproductive. A lot of it is basically a self-licking
ice cream cone, where the resources are going to sustain the
bases that we operate instead of actually fighting the
insurgency, as I suggested earlier.
But nevertheless, I think that when we come in and totally
take over a country with over 100,000 troops, we do have some
responsibility to restore law and order.
And I think in the case of Baghdad, for example, right now,
where we have three combat battalions operating within Baghdad,
fewer than 10,000 troops, that is just not going to be enough,
given the rate at which it takes to stand up Iraqi army and
security forces which will be able to go into the fight.
So I think you can't have 100 percent hard and fast
principles that you abide by in every single case. I think 99
times out of 100, you do want to go the low-intensity route.
You do want to favor special forces. You do want to put them on
the front lines and keep conventional forces as far back as
possible.
But when you have invaded a country and taken it over, I
think that is a different set of circumstances, where you have
to deal with that situation as it develops.
Mr. Saxton. Let me--go ahead, I am sorry.
Mr. Vickers. Just quickly on the--I think the future of the
long war or Global War on Terror will predominantly be
persistent operations in countries with which the U.S. is not
at war, leveraging locals.
And so as we redeploy forces and take on this additional
capacity that the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and the
program budget decisions will create, we will probably have
somewhere on the order of 80 ODAs to 90 ODAs deployed in 20
priority countries, and they may change, but they will span
continents, and then 40 or so other countries.
And so the key will be to have a distributed global
presence where we are working with lots of locals to suppress
this global insurgency down to very low levels.
And so if we are successful--and, you know, we may not
always be successful--rather than sort of what is the next hot
spot, it will really be how are we driving this global threat
down to lower levels across regions, South Asia, Central Asia,
Trans-Caucuses, Sub-Saharan Africa, et cetera.
Mr. Saxton. Let me change the subject slightly. The
Administration and Congress jointly made the decision over the
last several years to increase the number of folks in SOCOM.
And in so doing, when this idea first came up, the first
question that we had--I can remember asking it the first time
out in Coronado--how do we do this?
And the answer was painstakingly carefully, because we have
got to have a quality of person and a quality training program
that gets us to where we need to be. We are in the process of
this expansion. My question is how is it working.
General Downing. I will take a first crack at it. I think
it is working unevenly, by different elements, which you would
expect it would. I think the special forces that started this
X-ray program which takes people in off the street--and which
we haven't done since the 1970's. And I think we have got over
300 of these now in the force, of these men, and I understand
that they are performing extremely well. So that has worked
very, very well.
The Sea Air Land (SEALs), I mean, traditionally--and it has
not changed, to my knowledge, very much since 9/11--about 22
percent, 23 percent of the enlisted men and about 78 percent of
the officers make it through Basic Underwater/Demolition
Training (BUDs). I mean, that has historically been the rate,
and they have tried everything you can think of to try to get
that rate up.
Mr. Saxton. Have the number of trainers in BUDs increased?
General Downing. I can't answer that, Mr. Chairman. I know
somebody from the command could, so that has been difficult.
The air crews, they have been able to do that. They have been
able to keep that up. I think that they are going to have
enough crews to be able to man the additional aircraft that you
funded.
The Rangers, you know, basically, those are entry-level
soldiers that come in and get screened and go. I know one of
the things that we recommended in our report to the SECDEF was
they add another two Ranger battalions. They would be helpful
for the force structure, for the actual fighting now.
But the main reason we recommended they add about 1,000
more Rangers to the force structure is the Rangers become the
prime source of candidates after 3 years or 4 years in the
Rangers to go in to regular Army special forces and into the
Delta force.
And so what it does is it gives you a better pool to draw
from, or it gives you a larger pool, so that you could build
those forces. Once again, it takes time.
The Delta force is probably 70 percent Rangers who have
come out of either a Ranger special forces track or directly
from a Ranger regiment to Delta.
Mr. Saxton. How does the Marine Special Operations Command
(MARSOC) look to you?
General Downing. I understand that the MARSOC is building
well, and I have not talked with Denny Hejlik for, oh, probably
six months, but you know, my take is that that is going well.
And I am not involved in any of the, of course, visceral
issues that were attendant to bringing the MARSOC on, but I
think the MARSOC is a good idea, and I think SOCOM is going to
be able to make good use of those Marines.
Mr. Saxton. This expansion program to me seems to be very
important, but as was said to me when the subject was new to
me, certainly you do it very carefully.
Do you have any comments to make, Mr. Boot, Mr. Vickers?
Mr. Vickers. Yes. I would just underscore a couple of
points there, that you need a multifaceted approach to this.
One is things that aren't obvious at first light, like the
Rangers, in addition to their very valuable operational role,
really being seed corn for the rest of the force, and so if you
can grow that portion, then you can potentially grow the
others, and having these things in balance.
The 18X program was a very good initiative. That is how I
came into the force in the 1970's. They didn't call it that--or
early 1970's, but it is the same basic idea. And so you are
able to attract some characters that you might not get into the
Army other ways.
The retention and incentive programs to retain the force we
have--and some of the initiatives that General Downing talked
about, and one that I did--one on the officer side, that you
see that if this is main effort and our main war, that SOF
officers then can compete for Geographic Combatant Command
(GCC) positions and senior level commands will help with
retention and motivation.
And then the senior enlisted programs, which we are
starting to make some progress on as well.
So really, attention to all this, and going about it
reasonably gradually, which I think the department is on that
path. Where we have gotten in trouble before, like in Vietnam,
where we have done rapid expansions in shorter periods of time,
quality goes down.
They don't look like they are headed on that reckless a
path right now. But this is a daunting problem; same thing with
expanding the CIA. I mean, it is just very, very hard to do
without sacrificing quality.
Mr. Boot. I think one of the dangers involved here is that
you may further put even greater emphasis on direct action as a
result of this expansion than even exists today within SOCOM,
because, hard as it is to train men to become Seals or Delta
Force or some of these other elite special mission units, I
think it is even harder to train long-term type of cultural
skills and abilities that you need for special forces.
And in fact, I was talking to somebody in the audience here
earlier, and he was saying well, you know, you can train
commandos, but in terms of special forces you really have to
educate them.
It is not training. It is a long-term process of educating
and seasoning them in the field, where the skills are not--I
mean, you can quantify these basic military skills of the Seals
in the underwater demolition course or, you know, shoot houses
or whatever. I mean, you know what the standards are.
But it is much more difficult to quantify the standards
that you need for people in special forces, because a lot of
what you need is basically the ability to manipulate people, to
interact with foreigners, all these kinds of skills which are
very hard to put a hard and fast rule on and say that, you
know, we have reached this standard, and we are going to have
that standard, and we have X number of people at that standard.
It is very hard to do, and so I think there is a real
danger that as you expand out, what you are going to expand is
the number of basic people who are skilled, you know, shooters
and paratroopers and all the rest of it, but not necessarily
the skills that I think in some ways are the most important in
the war on terrorism with the softer side of the cultural
knowledge and the intelligence and all the rest of it.
And I think one way to counteract some of that is, as I
suggested before, the absolute imperative to recruit
foreigners, to not limit our recruiting to people who are
American citizens or green card holders.
I mean, I was talking to General Downing during the break,
and he was recounting how under the Lodge Act in the 1950's, I
mean, you had entire A-teams who spoke nothing but Czech or
Hungarian or some other language from Eastern Europe.
I mean, wouldn't it be pretty amazing if we had entire A-
teams today where the members spoke nothing but Arabic or
Pashto? I mean, these are exactly the kind of skills that we
need. And it is very, very difficult to get it by taking kind
of white-bread Americans and training them up to infiltrate
these foreign societies.
I mean, you can do some of that, and we need to do some of
that, but much more so we need to recruit from within those
societies so that we are not just getting these kind of direct
action skills, but we are also getting the kind of cultural and
softer side skills that I think are ultimately going to be more
important.
Mr. Saxton. Interesting idea.
Mr. Vickers, we are now going to go to Mr. Kline.
Mr. Vickers. If I can just add one point on that, there is
also a reciprocal relationship that is important on the UW
direct action side as well, that with the exception of the
surgical special mission units, some of the commando stuff
tends to be a young man's game.
And you know, at some point the body just can't carry the
150 pounds anymore, you know, and so you reach your mid 30's
and you can't keep up as well. That is not true for
Unconventional Warfare (UW)/Foreign Internal Defense (FID), and
for intelligence collection missions, which are dominant
missions to the GWOT.
And so part of the challenge here is also to retain, if I
may say it as well, some of the old geezers, the 40-year-olds,
who perform extremely valuable things but can't necessarily do
the knife-in-the-teeth stuff anymore. You know, they have
passed that point.
And they will help us a lot with the GWOT, and we need to
have a personnel system that lets us do that.
Mr. Saxton. Mr. Kline.
Mr. Kline. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, gentlemen, for being here. I apologize for being
a little tardy coming back after the votes, so I missed a
little bit of the discussion, and I caught the tail end of the
answer to Mr. Larsen's question. I will try not to be too
duplicative, whatever that word is.
We have had some pretty interesting recommendations from
Mr. Boot concerning perhaps a new organization and recruiting
only foreign language speakers. And that is interesting. I am
not sure if I buy onto the idea of bringing people into our
Special Operations Command who speak only Arabic. But it is an
interesting notion.
I did notice, Mr. Vickers, that you recommended that we in
Congress look at section 517, which is limiting the numbers of
E8s and E9s.
In that vein, could you give us, you know, an example like
that--it is open to any of you--of some specifics where you see
a problem, perhaps because of the expansion or for any other
reason, where we ought to be looking at making a change to make
the Special Operations Command work better?
Mr. Vickers. Yes. It really gets into the idea of can you
be a specialist longer. And the special mission units have more
exemptions and deal with this better, so, for example, you
know, as you move up the ranks you have to have broader and
broader command.
And so typically, an E8--or certainly when you get to E9,
even in the special mission units, you need to move out and
take on broader command. But they are able to use E8s as
snipers or small unit team leaders that is very, very different
from the rest of the Army. And it is a very, very valuable
thing to capture all that experience.
That then descends as you move down into the other elements
of the special operations community, that you lose the ability
to have operators as E9s, for example.
Mr. Kline. Right. No, I understand. I understand your
recommendation on 517. What I am asking is do you have other
recommendations.
Mr. Vickers. In this area on personnel, or----
Mr. Kline. Or anything. You came to us with a
recommendation, I thought--I wrote it down as one--that we
ought to look at section 517, which currently limits the
numbers of E8s and E9s, and we ought to look at changing that.
Mr. Vickers. Yes.
Mr. Kline. I agree with you. I think that is great. Now
what I am asking is----
Mr. Vickers. I got it.
Mr. Kline [continuing]. Do you have another one?
Mr. Vickers. Yes. Another one is section 1208, which is the
unconventional warfare or paramilitary funding that allows SOF
to work with the regulars. We had a big problem in 2001 in
Operation Enduring Freedom with this. Congress addressed this a
couple of years back.
As we move into an expanded definition of unconventional
warfare, rather than applying it against state sponsors of
terrorism, but applying it globally against transnational
actors, where you use surrogates to try to attack al Qaeda, the
resources are likely to go up beyond the current level.
SOCOM is working on plans in this area. I encourage you to
look at them and look at the resourcing requirements, which is,
I think, well above the current levels. But that is about all I
would say on it right now.
Mr. Kline. Okay.
General, did you have any thoughts?
General Downing. No, I think SOCOM also has some
recommendations for you, if they have not given them to you
already, on some reforms they would like to see in their
acquisition system allowing them to do some things faster, and
perhaps not get caught up in that DOD acquisition bureaucracy.
Mr. Kline. Wouldn't that be splendid?
General Downing. That would.
Mr. Kline. Not just for SOCOM.
General Downing. Maybe they could be the cutting edge of
it, to get it started.
Mr. Kline. And just a comment I would like to make, because
we have been talking about, particularly Mr. Boot, about the
softer perhaps part of SOF, and the special forces role of
training and working with indigenous personnel, and just a
comment.
The last couple of trips that I have taken to Iraq, we had
the chance to talk to our Green Berets who were training the
Iraqi--it used to be called the Iraqi counterterrorism force.
They have changed the names because a couple of weeks have
passed, so you have got to do that--and just doing a terrific
job in that training.
And by the way, the Iraqis, in our Special Operations
Command's judgment and in our own, looking at it, we are doing
a very good job. That is kind of a cross.
That is not bringing them, Mr. Boot, into our Special
Operations Command, but it is certainly working with people who
speak Arabic and are able better to work with the local
population. But again, that is in Iraq. And perhaps we ought to
look at things like that elsewhere.
And then finally, General McCrystal--thank goodness they
are doing some kicking down doors and tracking and following. I
still think that is an important part of what we are doing. And
the killing of Zarqawi and many other things, classified and
not, that they are doing are still very impressive, a very
important part of this war.
And I don't mean that to be argumentative with Mr. Boot,
because I think it is important that we do the other aspect as
well. And I am sorry that I missed the discussion with Mr.
Larsen about what we are doing in Africa, because that seems to
me to be very ripe for that very kind of work right now.
And perhaps if we had a lot of time, I would like to talk
about what has been going on in Somalia and Mogadishu and
certain things that have not gone well there. But I won't.
I will yield back.
Mr. Boot. Can I just briefly----
Mr. Kline. Oh, sure.
Mr. Boot. Is it okay if I respond very briefly?
Mr. Kline. Oh, yes.
Mr. Boot. Because, I mean, I completely agree with you. I
don't mean to say that we shouldn't be kicking down doors or we
shouldn't be killing Zarqawi. Obviously, that is a good thing
and a vital thing. I am just saying it is not enough.
I mean, it is a necessary part of the war on terrorism, but
there is a lot more that we have to do. And it is the other
parts that I think we are not as far advanced as we are,
because, in terms of the special mission units, they are the
best in the world.
They are tremendous professionals at what they do, and
there is a little bit of room for improvement in terms of how
they coordinate with other forces, but they are very, very
good. But what I am suggesting is there is more room for
improvement on the other side.
And just to clarify, I wasn't suggesting that we should be
recruiting people who only speak Arabic. Obviously, people who
are going to be in the U.S. armed forces or interact with them
have to have a basic command of English as well.
What I was just suggesting was that we need to recruit
native speakers of Arabic, people who will be bilingual, but it
is very hard to become bilingual, truly, if you start off
growing up here and trying to learn a foreign language through
the school system.
You have a much better chance of really having that native
level ability if you are, in fact, a native and you can speak
both English and your native language.
Mr. Kline. I am glad that you clarified that, because I
very clearly heard you say a couple of times spoke only Arabic,
and so I am----
Mr. Boot. No, what I was referring to was General----
Mr. Kline. Arabic as well as English.
Mr. Boot. Right. No, I mean, what General Downing was
talking about was, I think, if I understood him correctly, was
under the Lodge Act, when we were bringing Eastern Europeans in
the 1950's into the special forces, and you had units where
their level of proficiency in a language like Czech was high
enough that they could converse among themselves in Czech.
It wasn't that they didn't know English. This was the
language they could converse in among themselves.
Just a final point, if I could very briefly make, about
following up on the point that Mike made about retention, which
I agree is very important.
And I think one of the paradoxes or one of the kind of
screwy situations we have gotten ourselves into here is why do
the Special Operations Forces have such a hard time retaining
their most skilled and better operators.
And it is because they are being recruited by private
security contractors at very high rates of pay. And who is
paying those private security contractors? It is the U.S.
Government. Ultimately those people are being paid out the same
pot of money.
And so basically, the U.S. Government is competing against
itself for the services of the people that it trained and paid
for many decades in the Special Operations Forces, and we are
basically giving these contracts to Dyncorp or others to
recruit those people out of the special force, and then we have
to give more incentives to keep those people in the special
forces.
So I don't know what the solution is, but to an outsider it
seems like a somewhat screwy situation.
Mr. Kline. Thank you.
Mr. Vickers. May I add one point on the use of foreigners?
Another approach as well, which--I was trained by early Lodge
Act guys, but when I worked for the Central Intelligence
Agency, we were--I can't say too much about this, but we were
able to use foreign SOF a lot.
We established relationships with--who had, you know,
exquisite cultural knowledge and language that we could never
match and skills, and then we could direct for strategic
purposes. And that is a very, very valuable asset for the U.S.
Government, and something that we can do more of down the road.
Mr. Saxton. Let me just add a thought to this foreign
language line of conversation that we have been having. I would
go at least two steps further. It has also been mentioned here
today as a next step to understand that we need people who
understand local customs. A pretty simple concept.
And to go one step further, I think we need to understand
that people in different parts of the world think a whole lot
differently than we do.
And tell you how little experience that I had, the first
time I went to Iraq back in 2003 or 2004, whatever it was, we
went to visit a school, and while we were in the school--it was
actually Congressional Delegation (CODEL) Hunter. And while we
were in the school, the teachers were being just as nice as
they could be.
And as we were getting ready to leave, they said, you
Americans are here to help, right? Yes, ma'am. The teacher gave
me a list of things they needed in the school. And I didn't
think a lot about it at the time. I took it back to Ambassador
Bremer and gave it to him. I have no idea whatever happened to
the list or whether it got fulfilled or not.
But here is the conclusion that I drew. The Iraqi people
lived for 35 years having to make one of two decisions--that is
it--basic decisions: Be nice and cooperate with Saddam and be
treated well and have your list fulfilled, or not cooperate
with Saddam and be punished for it.
Those are the decisions that those folks had to make for 35
years. So we as Americans sit in our culture, with our way of
thinking, trying to be creative about all kinds of things, and
go do our own thing, and make thousands of decisions over some
period of time, and the Iraqi people had two decisions they had
to make: Be happy and cooperative with Saddam, or not.
And so the use of indigenous forces, however we decide to
structure the process to get there, is absolutely vital to our
effort. And we need to give some more thought to how we
interface with indigenous folks.
Anyway, we are going to have another series of votes here
in a few minutes. We want to thank you for being with us today.
And I am sure that when I ask you if you will be willing to
interface with us on an individual basis as we go forward and
try to figure out answers to the problems that we face as to
how we change our way of doing business, I am sure that, as you
are all shaking your head yes, you will be there to help us.
Thank you very much. We appreciate you being here today.
[Whereupon, at 12:31 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
June 29, 2006
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PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
June 29, 2006
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